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An anonymous reader writes "Interesting article on the upcoming efforts of the Department of Defense biometric capabilities and the ability to non-cooperatively tag, track, and locate individuals from a variety of military UAV platforms. Quoting Wired: "[The] Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot 'adversarial intent.' 'If this works out, we'll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas', says Dr. Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts. 'A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we'll know it was the same guy that went in.'"

I worked on a facial recognition biometrics project in grad school as a research assistant, the leading platform we found to compete against was Pitt-patt and even it wasn't suitable for this application. This research area is flooded with research, and most people are not taking ground-breaking steps.

Facial recognition is a difficult problem. Not just technically either. Too many people want this too much. They also don't appreciate all the difficulties. They're plums ripe for being taken in by scams.

Something I've come to appreciate is that comparisons are relatively easy. It's the representation that's the killer. Pixels are a completely brain dead way to represent an image. Very easy to do, but not useful for the kinds of comparisons needed for facial recognition.

I attended an interesting seminar about this, but I can't for the life of me remember who presented the material. It was essentially outlining the problem with "pixel-based" methods, since human beings and other animals don't even do this. It just happens to be the easiest way to get a machine to do things. The individual argued that pixel-based methods essentially have reached their limitations, and was instead arguing on more of an approach based on human perception through neurological research that I di

A face is only one way to identify someone- one which humans use extensively. But not the only one. The way you walk, the way you hold yourself, your body size and shape, your voice, and a host of other attributes are all fairly unique, when you look closely enough. Combining a group of them makes it even more powerful.

Although TFS specifically mentions faces, they could get trickier than just face recognition, e.g. gait analysis, etc. But those are easy to defeat too, possibly as simply as putting a rock in your shoe. (See Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.)

But if the thing's in an overhead UAV, a hat with a big floppy brim might work just as well as a mask. Or they could wear burkas.

That also assumes other bio-metrics such as height, build, gait, etc are not analyzed to determine if the person is the same.

None of which can be defeated by anything as simple as a mask, like wearing a fat suit and/or platform shoes...

That said, I've done a lot of work in various pattern analysis applications and have to wonder if it isn't my moral duty to separate the security-industrial complex from some of the American taxpayer's money...

And if you can follow multiple people, how many people will be walking around with a mask, a rock in their shoe, a body suit and high heels? It could perhaps make it harder to do, but it isn't exactly practical to do that all the time and that assumes that the target knows what measures are being used and can adequately compensate for all of them. Also, once the system is built, it requires many $3 masks and rocks and body suits and heels, etc and adds considerable extra time costs to evade. It makes lif

I'll bet you that there are hundreds of people -- if not thousands -- breaking that law every day in NYC [googleusercontent.com] (although this picture was not taken in NYC, the principle still applies). While the primary intention of this "mask" is not to hide your identity, it does -- or at least, can -- serve that purpose as well.

Scary question: at what level of certainty do they let the guy piloting the UAV push hellfire missile button based on this platform's "identification" of an enemy?

I think the idea of this is "higher then currently employed". For example, an analyst tracking a target that walks under a bridge and out the other side might be confident enough to give the go-ahead but assisted by a software bio-metrics package the analyst can be warned that based on height calculations the guy that just came out on the other side of the bridge isn't the target being tracked unless he just grew 3 inches.

No special clause, the military will use it only for military purpose, but given that police are already begging for(and getting) UAVs of their own and the contractors that develop the tech are profit driven it will take approximately 20 minutes before you find it in use against the local populance everywhere.

but given that police are already begging for(and getting) UAVs of their own.

We don't need any exotic new scenarios to be sure it will be used against us; a hundred years ago the National Guard made it clear by turning machine guns on striking workers. They'll never shy away from violence, whether it's overseas or right here at home. Anything to keep the profits coming and above all, the system intact.Once they feel threatened, it only takes a minute for them to show their true face.

My other post got deleted...but I will continue in my same "negative" stance. This is a technology that treats humans as targets, and some regimes around the world, every citizen is a potential target. Target for what? Here in Canada or the US it might be a day in prison but in other countries where US military technology has been exported it will be used for nefarious purposes. In other countries, and there are lots of them, the technology will be used for other purposes. And I am including cell-phone m

The British police are already using photographs and videos taken during the 2011 London riots to identify suspects. I don't really have a problem with that in this particular case; it seems to me that you don't have any sort of right to anonymity if you're in a public place, rioting and looting.

But the potential for abuse of this technology is just chilling. It can be used to identify rioters... but to a repressive regime, people assembling in public to protest the regime would be classified as "rioters".

Yep, and the whole concept of a "free speech zone" is just insane. We won't restrict your free speech...unless it's here, here, or here. Hiding protesters in places where almost no one sees them isn't how the TPM restrictions are supposed to work, but it's often the case.

Rules are stacked against you? Seriously? All you have to do is stay the fuck out of other people's way. The US guarantees the freedom of speech, not the freedom of fucking up traffic or getting in other people's way, nor does it guarantee you the platform of your choosing.

When it comes to the military industrial complex, there is never enough money that can be dumped down the hole.
And from the right-wing lovers of the constitution, and haters of government spending: Complete silent obedience.

Sad but true. "Keep the government out of our medicare." "Don't tax the job creators."

But any time something is spun towards the big bad terrorists, they'll be silent when we dump billions to accomplish nothing and even bend over and spread them (literally).

They use a pagerank like algorithm to analyze the person's social network (links in an out) and the person's actions (page content) and then compute a "TerrorScore" much like a google "Page Rank". They then knock these guys off one by one with UAVs. The whole thing runs unattended. Nobody knows exactly why people get killed, that's just the algorithm. They can't turn it off either unfortunately, because then the terrorists would win! Quick, somebody write a screenplay:).

I've been thinking about just sticking some cameras on my property and creating a database of every face they see and when, and every license plate that drives by.

I figure everybody else is doing it, so why not private individuals.

Post it all in one big free database online, and now everybody knows where everybody lives and works and what they're doing. Maybe the solution to privacy is for nobody to have it. Since, right now the only thing I can be sure of is that ordinary people don't have it. Equality would keep everybody more honest. Social norms/etc would just have to change.

This is actually the plot behind the pilot of Aeon Flux. The story takes place in Bregna, a country recently taken over in a coup and turned into an authoritarian society where everyone is under constant observation, including the power elites. Of course, the leaders and the resistance both find ways of avoiding the monitoring to advance their agendas.